Two years ago, the Hayward Gallery held its popular video-art exhibition Infinite Mix at The Store X, 180 the Strand. One of the most striking works in that show was Kahlil Joseph’s film installation m.A.A.d. (2014), which inspired curator Massimiliano Gioni from New York’s New Museum to mount Strange Days: Memories of the Future (until 9 December). The exhibition is “constructed around some of the atmosphere that Joseph evoked [in Fly Paper],” Gioni says. “The work is a kind of diary piece that talks about his own father, his memories [and is] inspired by Chris Marker in the sense of that first-person narrative, which is both confessional and fictional,” he says. “And it became a thread that weaves in and out of the exhibition.” Video installations by 21 artists spanning ten years of New Museum shows fill the building, including Ed Atkins, Wu Tsang and Camille Henrot. “While it’s a history of ten years of video works, it’s also about artists trying to see the future, or what has happened to moving images over the past ten years.”
Scenes of “extreme violence” grace the walls of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in the first major UK exhibition of the Spanish Baroque artist Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652). “These pictures were done to shock, to create visual impact in their day,” says Xavier Bray, the co-curator of Ribera: Art of Violence (until 27 January 2019). The show focuses on eight monumental paintings, such as Apollo and Marsyas (1637) from the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, in a thematic hang that includes drawings, prints and even human skin from the 19th century. “The violent scenes are informed by what Ribera would have seen on the streets of Rome and Naples”, Bray says. The martyrdom of St Bartholomew was a reoccurring subject for Ribera as it allowed him to show off his skill at painting human skin, at conveying the emotions and terror felt by Bartholomew, and the reality of the execution method: “the way the executioners perform the ritual, as if they are butchers going about their daily task,” Bray says.
This year’s Art Licks Weekend (until 7 October)—an annual festival of artist-run spaces in London—is looking further afield with its “peripheries” theme. As arts funding gets cut and rents continue to soar in the capital, many London artists have had to either move to the outskirts or leave the city completely. However, others are looking to more unconventional settings for shows and performances, such as disused phone boxes near the Royal Academy of Arts (by Eda Sarman and Kurt Bortecene) or on the Overground train from Liverpool Street (by the collective 117th Badgerscouts for Word In Transit). This year the festival has also invited projects from cities across to the country to take part, including Caustic Coastal from Manchester and Nomadic Vitrine from Birmingham. In a former bank in Walthamstow, the so-called Bank Job crew will open Hoe Street Central Bank (HSCB), printing their own fake banknotes to sell at face value and raise money to write-off payday debts and contribute to local causes.
